Introduction

This is a small template that you can use to add system tray icon support to your WTL based application. A big nod in the direction of Chris Maunder is due, as back in my MFC days I used his excellent CSystemTray class, which was the inspiration for this WTL version (though his adds much more functionality).

This template can be used to add "default" tray icon behaviour to your application. A menu is displayed when you right-click the icon, and double-clicking the icon will execute the default menu item. Note that the first menu item will be used as the default, though you can change this by calling SetDefaultItem.

To install an icon in the system tray, call InstallIcon from OnCreate (SDI/MDI apps) or OnInitDialog (dialog apps). Note that you supply three parameters to this call - the tooltip text, the icon handle and the resource ID of the popup menu to display when the tray icon is right-clicked.

Override the void PrepareMenu(HMENU hMenu) function in order to initialize the popup menu before it is displayed. For example, you may want to disable items, check items, etc. (see the WTLTrayIconWindow example for a demonstration).

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

I prefer it to MFC for many reasons. It creates much smaller EXEs with fewer dependencies, and will run on any platform (try running an MFC7 app on Win95 - you need some additional DLLs ... OLEACC.DLL I believe).

I also love template programming - using templates to extend existing classes (like this example) seems like the way forward. Coupling WTL with ATL, allowing easy COM support, is also great.

WTL itself is light ... MFC is monolithic. I have used MFC since 1994ish, and it has allowed me to write some great apps, but I think it's time has passed. My aim is to be able to do anything in WTL that I could in MFC, and so far so good.

I have written a form-editor type app with WTL that is a port of existing MFC code, yet is a THIRD of the size! I'll mail you a screen shot if you like...

All new projects I embark on will be in WTL - I have no need for MFC anymore. Part of this has also been the need to keep learning new skills, so adopting a new framework has also given me a warm fuzzy feeling inside...